Open Banking is set to launch in Europe next month. As banks and fintech firms rush to ensure compliance we...
UK based challenger bank Monzo announced what their plans are for 2018; three specific areas they wanted to highlight were launching a feature to help customers manage bills, ending their prepare program and helping customers to switch to their payments platform; as the company continues to build out new features they said they plan to keep updating clients on a month by month basis. Source.
Digital banks have been presenting themselves as a more transparent fairer option than the traditional players; what these newcomers are finding is to scale and reach profitability they will need to figure out a way to lend that doesn’t strike the same tone as customers get from their typical bank; Tandem, Monzo, Starling Bank, Revolut and N26 have all started to roll out lending options in a variety of ways by using a tailored data driven approach; figuring out where the balance lies is the key piece if these banks are truly going to disrupt the banking system. Source.
Monzo has added the first batch of partnerships to their marketplace by striking deals with digital wealth investment accounts and online lenders; companies include Scalable Capital, Wealthify, Wealthsimple, WiseAlpha, Zopa, Bricklane.com and Octopus Choice; Monzo will not be making a commission from any of these agreements; the company has also opened up an interim third-party API to comply with open banking regulations. Source.
Banks have started to use their customers as product developers as the look to make the banking experience more personalized;...
UK based fintech firms helped push technology investment in the UK to all time highs in 2017; fintech firms accounted for almost half of the £3bn invested; leading fintech firms TransferWise, Funding Circle and Monzo helped push the investment number as they all raised significant rounds; Eileen Burbidge, Partner at Passion Capital, tells AltFi, “"It's a testament to our exceptional entrepreneurs that the UK tech sector continues to produce companies that are leading in the development of cutting edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and fintech.” Source.
Monzo has grown its customer base over five times in one year and used different methods that help keep that base coming back; they ask for community feedback, open the company for equity crowdfunding rounds so users can invest and they host small, intimate events; 80 percent of their growth is word of mouth, the remaining 20 percent is through ads on Facebook and Twitter; “The biggest challenge is that we’re growing very fast — our customer and employee numbers are growing fast — we want to keep the customer focus, how we operate a transparent customer growth approach, and how we do that at scale,” as Tristan Thomas, Monzo’s head of marketing and community, tells TearSheet. Source.
Surveys by finance site Smart Money People and RFI Group both point to an important time for UK based digital banks; Starling Bank and Monzo were the top two banks in customer satisfaction according to Smart Money People; RFI Group found UK customers willing to use a digital only bank dropped from 78 percent to 54 percent in the past year; while the digital only banks please customers more they are beginning to run up against incumbent competition for a similar experience; digital only banks need to begin thinking about building long term businesses as the old guard catches up. Source.
Open Banking kicked off in the UK this past January. Thus far we’ve seen slower adoption among traditional banks, a...
Amazon has published a case study on the digital bank Monzo; Monzo leveraged AWS to build their bank which now...